


Like a Smooth River Stone

by JulyStorms



Series: Petruo Week: December 2014 [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 22:19:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2789747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulyStorms/pseuds/JulyStorms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That’s what he needs to be like—he needs to be unaffected, needs to be untouchable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Smooth River Stone

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Petruo Week Day 3: “Vulnerability.”
> 
> My hand slipped. Cello and I were talking about this, once—about how it would be so easy for new recruits into the military to imagine that the veteran characters were super disciplined badasses who didn’t flinch. So for this prompt, I decided to take a look at that. It’s not super long but I hope it gets the point across, anyway, especially with regards to the way Auruo might have viewed Levi as a fresh recruit.

The Survey Corps isn’t what Auruo expected.

He expected disciplined soldiers and hardened faces and resolve so thick that it could bear the burden of the whole goddamn world.

After his first expedition he doesn’t know what to believe anymore.

He sits with Petra in the back of one of the wagons nursing minor injuries, really—minor ‘cause half his team’s dead, and all of her team’s dead, and it was all terrifying enough that both of them had cried and pissed themselves like frightened children. The veterans that swooped in too late, their faces were calm, collected. Sweaty, yeah, but not afraid.

So when they get back to HQ, he thinks what he needs to do is become more like the veterans—more like Mike, who doesn’t say a goddamn word, more like Nanaba, whose face gives away nothing, more like Levi, with that furrow between his eyebrows that says nothing can touch him.

That’s what he needs to be like—he needs to be unaffected, needs to be untouchable, the kind of person that can see horrible shit and not cry about it, not feel too much, because too much feeling is gonna get him killed, is gonna affect how he deals with things, is gonna get in the way someday.

He and Petra are inseparable that first night back, and it’s not a surprise to anyone. The few survivors of their training class huddle together. Some of them cry, some of them talk about the hapless expedition they’d just experienced, but most of them just want the company of another person.

All Auruo wants is Petra, but he wonders in the back of his mind if this makes him weak, if this makes him not-like-the-veterans, if this is going to get him killed. But for the moment, he doesn’t care. He holds Petra’s hand for a moment, and then he’s holding all of her—so fucking tight he wonders how she can even breathe.

But she doesn’t complain about it. She just holds him back, nose buried against his neck, tears sliding down into the collar of his shirt. Damn. Shit. _Fuck_. And then he’s crying, too, thinking about the kids he’s known for three years, thinking about how some of ‘em aren’t ever going home again, thinking of how they didn’t even make it through their first expedition, wondering if it’s skill that got him and Petra through it, or if they just got lucky.

He just holds her close and knows it could’ve been them smashed against the ground, broken in half, eaten alive and whole (crying and screaming all the way down and even afterward).

They’re lucky. They pissed their pants and they cried, and he’s got a busted arm and she’s got a worrisome gash on her leg, but holy shit they’re _alive_ , and how the _fuck_ do the veterans look like that when they’ve seen years of this hellish shit? Do they just stop caring? Do they just get used to it?

Is that even possible?

He wants to ask Petra but he can’t. He can’t even voice his thoughts—can’t really put words to them, either, because it’s an abstract concept in the back of his head: he has to get better at…this—this being…what? Coping? He doesn’t know.

So he buries his face against Petra’s hair and tries not to cry and fails because he’s not a fuckin’ veteran. He’s a stupid piece of shit newbie and he’s scared half to death at all of this.

Hours pass before they stir again. It’s dinnertime, probably; the sun hangs low in the sky of the window on the other side of the room.

Petra makes a sound in the back of her throat, and he knows she’s just remembered the expedition, knows she’s thinking about her roommate who is now dead; she sounds like a wounded thing whimpering. But she bites down hard on her lip and she untangles herself from him. “Are you all right?” she makes herself ask. Her voice sounds too forced to be a natural question.

“Course I’m all right,” he says, and swallows the rest of his sentence: _I ain’t dead, am I?_

“We should eat.”

He can’t even muster the energy to call her a nag. “I’m not hungry.”

“Me neither.”

There is a moment of silence, which Auruo breaks. “Bet the veterans are just chowing down.” And then, a moment later, while Petra considers this: “Bet they wouldn’t let this shit affect their appetite. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should eat.”

Maybe if they eat, he thinks, it’ll put them one step closer to being veterans themselves. One step closer to looking at carnage and devastation without crying about it.

“Yeah,” Petra says. “Let’s try to eat something.”

* * *

 

The mess hall is surprisingly empty. They are the only 102nd members there. They get food and they sit down, and they look at their food and feel too sick to eat.

_Bet the veterans are just chowing down_ , he hears himself say in the back of his head.

But when he looks around, they’re not. There’s food in front of them, but nobody’s really eating.

Dita Ness is scribbling frantically on a piece of parchment in front of him; his food looks as if it’s been sitting there way too long.

One guy’s got his hand on a bottle of something strong—two of his squad members flank him on either side, half-leaning against him, faces buried in their arms.

Nifa stares out of a window. Luke pushes his food around on his plate. People are huddled together but they’re not talking and they’re not eating and Auruo can only stand it for a few minutes before he gets up.

“Huh?” Petra asks.

“I can’t sit here,” he says. But what he means is: this can’t be real. These are half veterans. These are the people who aren’t quite there yet. He doesn’t want to be around people like this—people who still suffer when they see shit they don’t want to see.

So they go for a walk. It’s too cold to walk, maybe, but they walk anyway. They walk outside, and then they walk inside, up and down the corridors, the barracks, the training halls, the officer’s wing: walking makes Auruo feel a little better, somehow—it’s almost like he’s doing something productive instead of feeling hurt and scared.

But they pass Mike’s open office door, and they see Mike at his desk not doing a damn thing; they see Nanaba curled up so small on the sofa in the corner that for a moment, Auruo’s not even sure that he’s seeing things right. Mike doesn’t notice either of them.

They move on. And then there’s Hange in her room by herself, Erwin Smith pacing in his office, a couple of people crying in their rooms even in the officer’s barracks.

When they stumble across Levi, Auruo’s confused, uncertain: everyone’s wearing a goddamn mask, he thinks, but most of ‘em—most of their stupid masks crumbled the moment they were safe again. _Why is that, do you think?_ he wants to ask Petra, but doesn’t. Doesn’t because she doesn’t have an answer. Is it ‘cause they’re safe and their friends aren’t? Because they watched a buncha kids get massacred? Because they walked in on a bunch of fresh recruits’ corpses and couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it except pull out the few survivors?

Levi looks the same as always. The furrow between his eyebrows is the same. His expression is impossible to _really_ read. He looks displeased, but he doesn’t look like he’s about to cry. He doesn’t look like his goddamn insides are twisting.

Auruo and Petra stop to salute him.

He nods and continues on his way back down the hall, toward Hange’s room.

When he’s out of sight, Auruo bites his lip. “Bet he’s on his way down there to tell that nutjob to eat some fuckin’ food or something.”

Petra doesn’t respond, and when he looks back at her, she’s staring after Levi. She turns to him, eyes still red-rimmed. He wonders if he looks the same.

“Do you think he cries about this kind of stuff?” she asks.

Auruo can’t picture it—can’t imagine a man like Levi cryin’ ‘bout anything.

Everyone else is cryin’ in their own way, but there’s no way that Levi is that weak—no way that humanity’s strongest soldier would have a mask that crumbled so easily.

Levi is unaffected. Levi is untouchable.

A rock, Auruo thinks. Sure, the river can wear a rock down, but it just makes them smooth—it doesn’t make them weak. Smooth—streamlined. It just helps them go with the flow of the water. He’s gotta be just like that if he wants to make it, if he wants to keep his shit together.

He grabs Petra’s hand. “Levi, cry?” he asks. “Nah, no way.”

 


End file.
